1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to signal processing and more particularly to a method for computing a location of an acoustic source.
2. Description of the Background Art
Spatial localization of people talking in a room is important in many applications, such as surveillance and videoconferencing applications. In a videoconferencing application, a camera uses spatial localization data to track an acoustic source. Typically, a videoconferencing system localizes the acoustic source by applying cross correlation techniques to signals detected by a pair of microphones. The cross correlation techniques involve finding the crosscorrelation between the time domain signals of a pair of microphones. The shift in time which corresponds to the peak of the cross correlation corresponds to the difference in time of arrival of the acoustic source to the two microphones. Knowledge of the difference in time of arrival infers that the source is located in a geometric plane in space. By using three pairs of microphones, one can locate the source by finding the intersection of the three planes.
However, the 2-microphone cross correlation techniques of the prior art provide slow, inaccurate, and unreliable spatial localization of acoustic sources, particularly acoustic sources located in noisy, reverberant environments. A primary reason for the poor performance of the two-microphone cross correlation techniques for estimating an acoustic source location is poor sidelobe attenuation of a directional pattern formed by delaying and summing the two microphone signals. For example, an acoustic source located in a reverberant environment, such as a room, generates acoustic signals which are reflected from walls and furniture. Reflected signals interfere with the acoustic signals that are directly propagated from the acoustic source to the microphones. For a 2-microphone array, the direct and reflected acoustic signals received by the microphones may increase sidelobe magnitude of the 2-microphone directional pattern, and may produce an erroneous acoustic source location. The poor sidelobe attenuation of the 2-microphone directional pattern is further discussed below in conjunction with FIG. 2C.
It would be advantageous to designers of surveillance and videoconferencing applications to implement an efficient and accurate method for spatial localization of acoustic sources, particularly acoustic sources located in noisy and reverberant environments.